It is well-known that music piracy is a prevalent problem for the music industry. In fact, profits for music distributors and artists have greatly decreased due to this piracy problem. In particular, the popularity of the Internet as an information exchange network for the general purchasing public is one of the primary causes. Digital music files, such as mp3 files, can be shared relatively easily and quickly amongst users over the Internet, without having to purchase a license from the music owners. This is also a problem for other types of media files that can be distributed over the Internet, such as digital video/movie files and digital books, etc. Consumers can easily make digital copies of the file and send them to other users that have not purchased a license over the Internet.
One existing solution is to encrypt the digital file using an encryption key. Therefore, even if a copy of the file is made and distributed to unauthorized users illegally, without the encryption key the copy would be useless. Unfortunately, users have developed a work-around for this solution in the form of sharing the encryption key with unauthorized users and even posting the encryption key on servers so that unauthorized users can receive a copy of the file as well as a copy of the encryption key required to decrypt the file. This allows a single digital file to be duplicated freely and played on virtually any device without purchasing a license from the owner of the multimedia content. Accordingly, there is desired a method and/or a system for restricting use of the multimedia content to only authorized users and authorized devices. In addition, there is desired a method and/or a system to additionally monetize or leverage multimedia content to recoup profits lost to distributors and artists through unauthorized use and distribution of the content, while also benefiting consumers.
Therefore, a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.